Forums at Group Home Gain New Urgency

For more than seven decades, the Pacific Lodge Boys Home has operated with little public incident or controversy, quietly aiming to guide wards of the court out of trouble and into productive adult lives.

For the past two years the group home has sponsored occasional symposiums where dozens of parents, law-enforcement officials and social workers sit down to search for practical solutions to teenage crime and abuse.

The discussion at a symposium scheduled Wednesday at Pacific Lodge promises to be particularly lively and thought-provoking because of the recent slaying of a 12-year-old boy from a group home in Calabasas and the case of a youth accused of killing his girlfriend while he was on leave from another such facility.

Pacific Lodge President David Genders said past forums on topics such as suicide, substance abuse and attention-deficit disorder among teens yielded spirited discussion. With these incidents so fresh he said he suspects it will be nearly impossible not to talk about conditions at the facilities.

Others agree these types of proactive discussions are imperative.

“We need this dialogue,” said Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, who will participate in the forum. “Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of monologue by officeholders. But there has been an absence of relevant discussion by people who have any knowledge of the facts. People spin their concepts up on some blackboard as though they know what these kids’ lives are about. So we need people who are literally in the crucible of experience to talk about it.”

In the case of young Rodney Haynes, two older boys who slipped away with him from the Passageway group home in Calabasas are in custody after allegedly admitting beating to death the 85-pound Compton boy and leaving his body in a dumpster. State officials subsequently removed all 23 wards from five Passageway facilities after an investigation found an insufficient number of administrators, among other violations. Passageway officials called the action a “witch hunt.”

In the second recent case, involving the Mid-Valley Youth Center in Van Nuys, a 17-year-old resident is accused of causing his girlfriend’s fatal head injury while he was out on a weekend pass.

The accused youth, unidentified because of his age, remains in Sylmar Juvenile Hall. Authorities hope to charge him as an adult.

As of June, there were just more than 23,000 youngsters housed in 1,700 group homes in California, said Corrine Chee, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Social Services.

Chee said the facilities, sometimes run by private caretakers who can get upward of $3,000 a month per child, are designed to provide a family-like setting for young offenders, rather than the isolation of a more institutional setting such as jail. The hope is that children such as Haynes, who became unruly and took to the streets after his foster mother died, will prosper at group homes and overcome continued run-ins with police.

“There are a lot of problems with group homes,” Chee said. “And the providers are very well paid to take care of them. So when something happens, the providers need to own up to their responsibility. When they sign on, they know these are troubled kids.”

Pacific Lodge, one of the oldest and largest group homes in Los Angeles County, historically has recorded few serious incidents, according to state officials. The 10-acre facility, home to about 75 boys who live in well-kept bungalows, has been at the same Woodland Hills site for much of its 74-year history.

Woodland Hills Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Carol Mashburn said the city has conducted various successful programs with the home, including one in which youths shadow local business owners for a day.

Experts agree that public forums such as those at Pacific Lodge are crucial in preventing the deaths of children like Haynes. Jacquelyn McCroskey, an associate professor in USC’s School of Social Work, said diverse “multidisciplinary” approaches and forums that involve law enforcement, social workers and parents help create better-functioning group homes.

She added that with thousands of teens with complicated emotional problems inundating the system, the problem of how to deal with them has forced more cooperation between the public and private sector than ever before.

Kroeker said he plans to avoid finger-pointing at Wednesday’s forum and instead stress the need for programs promoting early intervention before young children start heading toward gangs or running away from home.

“There’s a mind-set among people that says lock everybody up,” Kroeker said. “And a more effective mind-set to me is to be strategic at every stage of the way as kids are developing. As they start to head for things like gangs, intervene and provide positive things for them.”

Genders, meanwhile, said he dreams of the day when he won’t have a job in housing struggling teenage boys.

“How do we keep kids out of trouble?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t want to be in business. I come to work every day and say, ‘What can we do to not have this type of business?’ That’s my goal every day: to figure out how society can get to a point where it doesn’t need to incarcerate its kids.”

Wednesday’s symposium, “Youth at Risk: Creating Solutions,” begins at 7 p.m. For more information call (818) 347-1577, Ext. 116.